With Our 

Faces in the 

Light 



Frederick 
Palmer 



/ 






Class 
Book. 




Copightlf._ 



C0KRIGHT DEPOSIT 



WITH OUR FACES 
IN THE LIGHT 



BOOKS BY FREDERICK PALMER 

The Vagabond 

With Kuroki in Manchuria 

The Last Shot 

My Year of the Great War 

The Old Blood 

My Second Year of the War 

With Our Faces in the Light 



WITH OUR FACES 
IN THE LIGHT 

By 

FREDERICK PALMER 

Author of "My Second Year of the 
War," etc. 




NEW YORK 
DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY 

1917 



•T3 



Copyright, 1917, by 
DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY, Inc. 



/ 

JUN 12 1917 

©CI.A467421 



WITH OUR FACES IN 
THE LIGHT 



NEW visions arose and old vi- 
sions were intensified when a 
traveler war-old, perhaps war- 
wise, whose message is in this little 
book, had the greatest thrill of the war 
in a quiet Virginia railway station as a 
newspaper bought from the car-steps 
told him that Congress had given the 
word for blows. 

Now the struggle that I had seen 
begun with the young Belgian King's 
call of his country to arms; that I 
had seen continued in Belgium's living 



2 WITH OUR FACES 

Seath under German rule, in a Paris 
holding its breath while it awaited 
word from the Marne, in the glad pur- 
suit of the Germans to the Aisne, in 
all the processes of trench vigils and 
attacks and counter attacks on the 
Western front, had become our strug- 
gle. It meant Virginia and Maine 
and California as well as Flanders and 
France; it meant you and me. 

I was seeing Virginia out of the car 
window in the gracious spring sun- 
light. Virginia had known war of old 
as suffering France knows it to-day. 
The spirits of the men who fought in 
her fields came to life in blue and gray 
legions, and faded, and I was back on 
the Somme where a battalion of the 
New Army had halted beside the road. 
A chill autumn rain was falling and 



IN THE LIGHT 3 

dripping from the steel helmets of the 
men, yet the air was singularly lumi- 
nous, bringing distant objects near 
and emphasizing nearby objects by 
suppression of detail, while the guns 
kept on pounding and the transport 
rumbled in ceaseless undertone like the 
current of a great river. 

Ahead was the Ridge which was to 
be attacked, and above its crest of shell- 
torn earth rose the broken wall of a 
church and some limbless trunks of 
trees against the horizon. The bat- 
talion commander came over to where 
I was standing and made a casual re- 
mark. Then he looked away at the 
Ridge and back to his men, whom he had 
trained from civilians into practical 
soldiers. They stood at ease, mud plas- 
tered, silent, in that wondrous glow, 



4 WITH OUR FACES 

illumined by the spirit of the moment. 

" With their faces in the light ! " 
he exclaimed. " That is it, and all of 
it!" 

With their faces in the light the 
British had crossed the Channel, and 
the Canadian, the New Zealander, the 
Australian and the South African had 
crossed oceans to fight beside the 
French. 

Three years ago they had had no 
more thought of this sacrifice than I 
had of learning one day in a Virginia 
railway station that the United States 
had declared war on Germany or that 
our women and children would ever be 
murdered by U-boats. They had not 
chosen their part any more than we 
had chosen ours. It had been chosen 
for all in Berlin. 



IN THE LIGHT 5 

" Your country will come in even- 
tually," the officer said, after we had 
talked for a while. 

"Why?" 

" Because your faces are in the light," 
he answered. " Propaganda may de- 
lay you — I know little of policies or 
politics — but you will come in because 
that thing which we are going against 
on the Ridge will drive you and the 
thing that is sending us to the Ridge 
is calling you." 



II 

I KNEW out of the depths of ex- 
perience what the officer meant. 
The lesson had come hot and 
true at the front. It was personified 
now as a British soldier passed. His 
salute was that of obedience to rea- 
soned purpose, with no surrender of 
the inner self that makes the individ- 
ual. In the British and the French 
armies an officer may not strike a 
man. The men in the allied trenches 
talk freely among themselves and criti- 
cise their statesmen and government 
policies, but turn from discussion to 
the reasoned obedience of orders. Their 
minds are their own. 
7 



8 [WITH OUR FACES 

Then some German prisoners went 
by. Their rigid salute was a surrender 
of self to superior rank with a clock- 
work automatism. In the German 
army an officer may strike a man; his 
bodily self-respect is forfeit and his 
mind, too. How often prisoners had 
told us that they never discussed their 
Emperor or the government's doings 
for fear of being punished! Their 
minds were not their own. 

Yet the American beside the road, 
a neutral, recollected that the Rus- 
sian officer also might strike his men. 
But the Russian soldier had not been 
long out of serfdom. He belonged in 
another age. In most instances he 
could not read and write. The Ger- 
man belonged in this age, literate, or- 
ganized, with a trained brain yielding 



IN THE LIGHT 9 

its trained capabilities in blind com- 
pliance. 

I had seen a light in the German 
faces, too, in the early days — the light 
of conquest which endures only with 
success. In its place came the gleam of 
hate, baffled hate. 

" You have no prejudice against the 
Germans ? " I asked the officer. 

" None. They are an obstacle to be 
overcome," he said. " At the start of 
the war I had prejudice. But how 
can I have prejudice now when the 
prisoners tell us that France invaded 
Germany? They believe what they are 
told." 

" Not all of them," I replied. " Some 
know better, and they know that they 
are in the wrong. They try to stifle 
their consciences with self-deceit, as 



10 WITH OUR FACES 

other nations have tried when they 
were in the wrong. They fight stub- 
bornly by the very criterion of the 
aim of materialism that sent them into 
the war, as if by fighting to prove 
that they are in the right. The others 
fight in defense, as they think, and take 
their moral satisfaction from their faith 
in the lies told them from the top." 

I did not forget instances where 
German soldiers, in answer to the hu- 
man impulse, had held their fire to al- 
low the allied wounded to be brought 
in and had been disciplined for their 
weakness by their officers. 

" Their light comes from without," 
said the officer. " The staff supplies 
it and the staff is strong, the system 
strong. Our light comes from within, 
though it has not come from within in 



IN THE LIGHT 11 

all of England's wars ; and there you 
have the whole of this business. 55 

His men took up the march to the 
hazard of death with the wondrous 
light of that early afternoon in their 
faces as it must have been in the faces 
of the Crusaders, the Minute Men, and 
those who went to the relief of the be- 
leaguered women and children at Luck- 
now — against a system. 



Ill 

WAR opens the national ledger, 
puts the stethoscope on the 
national heart, sounds the 
national character. Had we grown 
soft, as some people said? Were we 
only an agglomeration of races and 
not a nation? What spirit did we 
bring to our task? How deep and 
how true was our patriotism? 

I had had many lessons in patriot- 
ism from association with those men 
whose courage was a wall in France be- 
tween us and the Germans. One of in- 
delible simplicity I had from Francis 
Grenfel, who saved the guns at Mons, 
13 



14 WITH OUR FACES 

when he was convalescing from his 
second wound. 

" That is what we are fighting for," 
he said, as we were strolling above the 
valley of the Thames and he swept his 
hand toward the carpet of hedge and 
field. 

Later, on the same afternoon, he 
asked me if I should like to see the 
diary which he had kept through the 
retreat from Mons and the first bat- 
tle of Ypres. We sat in the silent 
library of the house while I read 
his brief, soldierly, unaffected account. 
Frequently there were only a few lines 
of entry, but many times the last 
words of the day were, "For Eng- 
land ! " written out of the heart in the 
secrecy of a private journal. Again 
he wrote, " I am glad to do this for 



IN THE LIGHT 15 

England," after the fighting had been 
particularly hard and his part very 
active. 

" When I go back I suppose that I 
shall get it," he said, as a matter of 
course. " Not that one wants to die. 
Who does ? " and he looked fondly out 
of the window across the sweep of 
lawn toward the banks of his beloved 
Thames — which he was not to see 
again. 

"Isn't that worth fighting for?" I 
thought, as I looked out at the Vir- 
ginia fields. 

Then I was back in thought in a 
captured German trench and a French- 
man, speaking of what France meant 
to him, took up a handful of soil: 

"This is France!" he said. "I 
have France in my hand ! " 



16 WITH OUR FACES 

His roots were in the earth. His 
ancestors were in France when Caesar 
came with his conquering legions. He 
had not to reason about the causes of 
the war. His cause was under his 
feet in the inheritance of countless 
generations of Frenchmen, holding fast 
to their tongue, their literature, their 
France. 

Where he had only a country from 
the Mediterranean to the North Sea 
and Grenfel only a country from 
Land's End to John o 5 Groat's, I had 
a country extending from Canada to 
the Rio Grande and from the Atlantic 
to the Pacific. Long periods of ab- 
sence had taught me to envisage it as 
a whole. Sheer legal titles to real 
estate aside, I had a claim on the 
whole. Where Grenfel and the French- 



IN THE LIGHT 17 

man were poor in acres I was 
rich. 

As either man spoke I was not see- 
ing the valley of the Somme or the 
Thames, but the New England hills 
and the factory towns beside the wind- 
ing streams ; the valley of the Hudson, 
which you may enjoy for the taking 
of a train; the rich, black acres of 
the Middle West turned under the 
plow; the cotton fields in bloom; the 
Mississippi with the immensity of its 
eternal flow calling to the imagination 
as a unifying power to all the States 
and towns which it passed on its way 
to the Gulf; the irrigation farms in 
the midst of the desert ; the Rockies in 
massive grandeur outdoing imagina- 
tion; and the orange groves and all 
the world beyond the Rockies looking 



18 WITH OUR FACES 

out toward the Pacific — all was Amer- 
ica, where I was at home in the great, 
widespread American family. I could 
take up the soil of any part of it in 
my hand and say that it was mine. 

" When I think what England has 
done for me, this is the least that I 
can do for England," said Grenfel. 

To him it was simply a matter of 
paying a debt; a debt which in this 
instance was paid with his life to the 
land that had given him life. 

I recalled a dedicatory ceremony in 
a small town at home. A man who had 
gone from the small town to the city 
when he was young and accumulated 
a fortune had given to his native place 
a recreation park. All of the speech- 
making was about the honor that he 
had brought to the community by being 



IN THE LIGHT 19 

born there. No one mentioned what 
the community had done for him ; even 
he overlooked the thought, which would 
have brought the light into his face if 
it had occurred to him. He was only 
paying his debt to the mother earth 
of his rootage with his gold, a debt 
which some have to pay with their 
lives. For the time comes to every 
nation when it must pay its debt to 
its parent soil. 

How much America has done for us ! 
How much we owe to this new land, fal- 
low to our rootage, pliant to our shap- 
ing! Some parts of it have beauty of 
scene and richness of loam together; 
others, monotonous distances and hard 
tillage. Nothing looks better to me 
when I return from enforced absence 
abroad than a stone wall running over 



20 WITH OUR FACES IN THE LIGHT 

the knoll of a Connecticut farm. The 
Tiber is a commonplace river, but it 
was the mother river to the Romans 
who set the mistress city of the world 
on its banks. The Greeks immortal- 
ized in sculpture the marble ridges of 
their sterile land which they loved be- 
cause it was theirs. There is no true 
patriotism without the patriotism of 
the soil. 



IV 

THERE is the patriotism of tra- 
dition, too. It is a hollow 
form unless you live up to it; 
the excuse of inertia, the proxy of 
courage and sacrifice for a dying peo- 
ple in their degeneration. Need one 
ask if we had it when one was in Vir- 
ginia? George Washington was a Vir- 
ginian. 

The European thinks of us as young. 
We are and, let us hope, ever shall be 
young, and ever with our faces in 
the light. Yet we are old — the old- 
est of the great republics. Our tra- 
dition is one hundred and forty-one 
years young or old, as you please. It 
21 



22 WITH OUR FACES 

began with the winning of freedom and 
the shaping of it. Where other nations 
take their traditions from kings who 
built for themselves unlimited mon- 
archies, we take ours from an elected 
President. We had freedom when Eng- 
land still sent prison ships to Australia 
and parliamentary institutions were not 
yet born in France, which does not en- 
sure that we shall retain it or prove that 
Americans are freer than Englishmen 
and Frenchmen to-day. Such a guar- 
antee rests with the present generation, 
and with every present generation in 
all the ages to come. 

Those of us who have felt the racial 
pull in this war had best remember 
that Washington fought his race for 
a principle. We have been neglecting 
Washington of late years, perhaps. 



IN THE LIGHT 23 

He is of sterner stuff than some of 
the dispensations of an irresolute de- 
mocracy favor. We shall revert to 
him more and more as we come to 
sterner times. He made the nation. 
Others have had only to hold it to- 
gether. 

To the average American of to-day 
he is a kind of autocrat, this greatest 
of republicans; a dim, shadowy figure 
in the garb of the age of aristocracy; 
but I envisage him as near, human and 
real as he mounted his horse to ride 
away to take command at Cambridge 
in the prime of manhood. Never did 
mortal set out with a finer light in his 
face, or on a braver mission, or on one 
which meant more to the world. Never 
had a people a finer tradition in leader- 
ship. 



24 WITH OUR FACES 

Those Australians and Canadians 
who are fighting in France, more than 
they realize, owe the heritage of their 
freedom to the lesson that Washing- 
ton's sword taught; and all kings of 
the German breed, whether set on home 
or on foreign thrones to-day or in '76, 
owe him eternal hate. But for him 
and his tattered regiments there might 
have been no allied cause and the in- 
vasion of Belgium would not have 
shocked the sensibilities of civilized 
conscience. 

The richest man in America may 
take a lesson from him who was the 
richest man of his time in Virginia. 
With all to lose, he risked all. His 
wealth and family position assuring 
aristocracy's favor if he chose it, he 
might naturally have inclined to be a 



IN THE LIGHT 25 

loyalist; and if he had George III. of 
Hanover would have won. He faced 
the odium of rebellion, of personal 
ruin, when precedent did not augur 
the success of rebellion against the 
intrenched monarchism of Europe. Yet 
with his broken, ill-fed troops in re- 
treat, harassed by intrigue, his resolu- 
tion never faltered. No matter what 
the distress of his cause he fought 
cleanly — and how cleanly compared to 
the way that Prussian monarchism has 
fought! Without munitions he stuck 
it as the British and the French stuck 
it at Ypres, for he was the sticking 
kind. 

Valley Forge, not Gettysburg or 
Lexington, should be the shrine of our 
patriotic pilgrimages. Lexington was 
the flash of patriotic impulse which 



26 WITH OUR FACES 

might have been merely the abortive 
uprising of some farmers if the rebel- 
lion had not become a revolution. Val- 
ley Forge was the test of democracy 
in arms; the trying out of the man- 
hood of the country. In that winter 
camp came the decision whether or not 
we were worthy of winning a heri- 
tage, as again and again our worthi- 
ness to preserve it must be proven. 

The relics at the old headquarters 
at Valley Forge, which I visited after 
the Somme battle, were only the sym- 
bols which helped me in these days of 
luxury to visualize that stalwart re- 
publican seated at the table, going 
over his papers with the exactitude of 
the thrifty planter, the considerate 
employer that he was; holding his 
temper under great stress and letting it 



IN THE LIGHT 27 

flash out humanly over cowardice or 
incompetency ; or stooping in his height 
\o pass out of the door to make the 
rounds of the log huts, reprimand- 
ing a malingerer, heartening a sentry 
in a storm with a kindly word, bring- 
ing the light into the faces of his ill- 
clad, half -famished men when the world 
thought that his cause was lost. 

I should be small-minded indeed not 
to be proud of ancestors who had 
shared such hardships, and smaller- 
minded still if I thought that the latest 
immigrant to arrive at Ellis Island 
might not be as good a citizen as I. 
It is well to repeat these obvious 
things lest we forget them; well to re- 
member the fortitude which made us a 
nation when fortitude is required of us 
again. 



28 WITH OUR FACES IN THE LIGHT 

Washington had no gift for speeches 
or infectious catch phrases which use 
tradition as the mask for a play of 
words. He made tradition. He 
wrought with deeds. If he had chosen 
he might have been dictator, even king ; 
but this was the thing he fought 
against. The spirit that sent him into 
retirement as a citizen when his work 
was finished — that is the spirit which 
is arming a civilized world more than 
a century later against the usurpation 
of power. He had no thought of being 
an indispensable man; therefore he 
was the indispensable man. His was 
the patriotism of character; Valley 
Forge the patriotism of fortitude. 



IT was the sight of a small frame 
house from the car window that 
made me recall the remark of an 
English officer to one of those Ameri- 
cans who were the bane of Europe to 
self-respecting Americans until we came 
into the war. Some tried to conceal 
their nationality, others voiced their 
shame of country. I like to see the 
American abroad neither boastful of his 
own land nor deriding the customs of 
other lands because they are different 
from his own ; but ready to learn from 
others and prompt to justify his own 
country when it is maligned or to inter- 
pret it when it is misunderstood. This 
29 



30 WITH OUR FACES 

American was despising himself for be- 
longing to a nation too proud to fight. 

" I have read the history of Stone- 
wall Jackson's campaigns," said the 
Englishman significantly ; and this was 
all he said. 

In that little frame house Stone- 
wall Jackson had died. I had passed 
it on other occasions, but this time the 
sight of it touched new chords. Jack- 
son is now a tradition with us, as is 
Lee. We may all share him along with 
Grant. The thing that matters now is 
the way that the South fought. She 
had the dignity that ennobles a lost 
cause. She had the light of conviction 
in her face. All she asked was to set 
up a house of her own. Her reading 
of the Constitution gave her this right. 
True to parliamentary form the legis- 



IN THE LIGHT 31 

latures of her States deliberately passed 
their acts of secession, served their no- 
tice. 

I like to recall that anecdote of 
Longstreet, when he went to Richmond 
after resigning from the United States 
army, heavy of heart but having chosen 
between his people and his nation. 
Jefferson Davis asked him if his ac- 
counts as quartermaster were audited 
before his resignation and Longstreet's 
answer was the silence of disdain of 
such a question to an officer and a gen- 
tleman. I like to dwell on the fact 
that every Southern naval officer in 
command of a United States man-of- 
war brought his ship as United States 
property back to a United States port 
before he joined his own people. If 
Grant or Sheridan had been a Missis- 



32 WITH OUR FACES 

sippian he would have fought for Mis- 
sissippi. 

The South fought to maintain its 
new house against invasion; and with 
the light in its face, the temper of 
its steel was in this conviction. After 
the Civil War we of the North did 
the South a great wrong. Having 
fought to keep her in the union and 
having kept her, we did not treat her 
as a sister. 

It is good to think that again we 
are one in the same kind of cause, in 
the name of all the world, as we were 
in the name of the thirteen colonies. 
Had Lee won he would have been ac- 
claimed another Washington. If there 
had to be a civil war we should be 
grateful that it gave us such men as 
Lee. He, too, ever fought cleanly. 



IN THE LIGHT 33 

Contrast his orders to his men in the 
invasion of Pennsylvania with German 
orders in the invasion of Belgium. I 
was seeing him and Grant at Appomat- 
tox and hearing Grant tell Lee that 
his men were to keep their horses, as 
they would be needed for the spring 
plowing. Lincoln must have been 
happy when he heard that remark. It 
had an immortal simplicity. 

In no part of the country is our hu- 
man rootage deeper in the soil than in 
the South. It is the sense of his debt 
to the soil that makes the Southerner 
so devoted to his State and his com- 
munity. City dwellers sometimes think 
this devotion narrow and provincial, 
when in truth it breathes the very 
spirit that made the Frenchman take 
up a handful of earth. The soil was all 



34 WITH OUR FACES 

that the South had left when those lean 
men and their lean horses went back 
to the plow. With more than the at- 
tachment of an agricultural people 
they realized the motherhood of earth. 
Theirs has never been the vagabondage 
of apartment houses. They have a 
vested interest of generations in Amer- 
ica, this old American stock. 

Is the spirit of the Jacksons and 
the Lees still there? Oh, quite! I 
had to go no farther for proof than 
the Southern home where I had spent 
the night before the declaration of 
war. It was in the father and the 
mother and in that large family of 
children around the table. I suspected 
it of peeping out from the heirlooms 
of old mahogany furniture. I think 
that it was more pleasantly situated 



IN THE LIGHT 35 

in its surroundings in the North Caro- 
lina hills where hospitality is inborn 
than in big houses where hospitality is 
hectic with the effort for something 
that it lacks — the something that this 
Southern home possessed. 



yi 

REVERENCE of tradition and 
love of the soil in Virginia : what 
in New York or in Chicago? 
You must go to the foreign quarters 
of our great cities to realize how the 
European recipe for patriotism does 
not apply to us. The appeal that has 
been most potent in calling the nations 
of Europe to arms through the ages we 
never make. Our patriotism rests on 
countering one of the most vital sources 
of theirs. 

" We understand the President's dif- 
ficulty," said an English statesman 
early in the war. " He would have a 
German rebellion on his hands if you 
declared war on Germany." 
37 



38 WITH OUR FACES 

In common with all Europeans, to 
whom patriotism is the loyalty of race, 
he could not understand how Scots, 
Prussians, Hungarians, Irish, English, 
Poles, Russians, Italians, Bulgars, 
Greeks, Swedes, Serbs and Dutch could 
be made one. 

"While our foreign policy, except 
the Monroe Doctrine which concerns 
foreign nations," I reminded him, " va- 
ries with succeeding administrations, 
our policy in relation to foreigners in 
the United States is fixed. It is not the 
result of any prevision of the State De- 
partment or of Foreign Relations com- 
mittees, but the very essence of the 
instinct of patriotism and self-preser- 
vation of democracy of which the aver- 
age man is hardly conscious." 

The statesman smiled. He was po- 



IN THE LIGHT 39 

litely skeptical, as he might well be, 
for Ireland was very troublesome at 
the time. Indeed, I also was becoming 
skeptical in the midst of that racial 
contest in Europe as the result of let- 
ters from home, which gave the impres- 
sion that, despite all the Fourth of 
July speeches and the Red, White and 
Blue in the schools, we were only an 
assembly of races encamped. 

The vaunted melting pot had failed 
to do the melting or, rather, there had 
been no such thing as a common melt- 
ing pot. Our patriotic cooking was 
being done in the same number of pots 
as there were foreign languages spoken 
in New York and Chicago. I should 
find myself with a faction but without 
a country. 

Therefore, upon my return Ellis 



40 WITH OUR FACES 

Island bulked large in the harbor view 
in relation to the Statue of Liberty. 
When I went ashore to see, with the 
eyes of eighteen months' absence, all 
the alien faces in the streets, I felt al- 
most a stranger in my own land. I 
understood the foreign point of view. 

How could one expect these new- 
comers to be American? They had no 
place for rootage except tenements and 
pavements. It was only natural that 
they should revert to the scenes of 
their childhood and their ancestors' 
childhood, which had the same pull for 
them as the French countryside for the 
Frenchman and the English country- 
side for the Englishman. Had they 
come to America for liberty? Usually 
it was for material advantage. They 
arrived third class in the hope of de- 



IN THE LIGHT 41 

parting first class. America was to 
them a bank account. 

I was quite cynical until I passed a 
schoolhouse on the East Side, where 
the children swarming out of the door 
made a scene which wrought with the 
quickness of magic a change of mood. 
They were all speaking English. They 
had the bond of language. The next 
generation would not know their mother 
tongues, and difference of language, 
Kant had said, was the cause of wars. 
No one offended their racial or reli- 
gious susceptibilities in that broad tol- 
eration established by our forefathers. 
French-Canadians after centuries of 
the French language in Quebec ac- 
cepted English here. Americanization 
was a thing of private influence, the 
very opposite of Germanization or 



42 WITH OUR FACES 

Russianization in Poland ; for our gov- 
ernment orders no one to be American. 
A concerted public opinion turns the 
trick. 

When I saw the flag flying over the 
schoolhouse, I was reminded that it 
had not flown over the one where I 
went to school. In a community of old 
Americans it was not necessary, any 
more than a French flag over a French 
schoolhouse. But the sons of the 
newcomers had the symbol of their 
adopted land before their eyes. The 
fathers who could not read a line of the 
constitution could see the flag. When 
I asked foreign-born or second genera- 
tion whether they were pro-Ally or 
pro-German they answered sharply, 
" Pro-American ! " That was the thing 
to say, at least. Anyone who said 



IN THE LIGHT 43 

anything else would have found public 
opinion a speedy corrective. 

I realized, with the war ever in the 
background of my thoughts, what a 
wonderful business this assimilation of 
races was in all of its manifestations, 
methods and symbols. It gave me a 
new pride of country; a sense of shar- 
ing in a world benefaction. Unceas- 
ing instruction is proceeding; every 
American is a pedagogue in a land 
where newcomers have to be taught 
our common tongue and how to do 
their work in the midst of the adjust- 
ments of our rapid growth, where op- 
portunity intensifies the ambition of the 
second generation. In older countries 
more is taken for granted, because more 
is really granted in the standardization 
of existence, son following in the foot- 



44 tWITH OUR FACES 



/ 



steps of father. We must teach, ex- 
plain, insist. 

That weakness for display which 
foreigners say we have is only a part 
of the work of Americanization. After 
the breaking off of diplomatic relations 
with Germany, I was taxed for not 
having the Stars and Stripes in my 
buttonhole. I might have answered 
that I carried it in my head and 
heart. I might have said that it would 
hardly occur to a Frenchman from the 
trenches if he came to America to wear 
a flag to show that he was a patriotic 
Frenchman. But I should have been 
in the wrong. The flag was a symbol 
of educational value. Show your col- 
ors, everybody ! Are you American or 
not? 

It occurred to me that in the cur- 



IN THE LIGHT 45 

riculum of absorption the face of 
Lincoln on the cent piece had an influ- 
ence on newcomers. To people used to 
kings on their coins, he is the repre- 
sentation of our idea of kingship. His 
sayings, his speeches, have become the 
maxims of democracy; he personifies 
the patriotism of idea — a man such as 
no other nation has ever had, giving 
character to ours. In the darkest hours 
his face was always in the light ; and it 
was this that made him immortal. 

" These old Americans talk as if 
they had all the patriotism, 5 ' said a 
Pole to me in broken English. " I'm 
sick of their telling us newcomers at 
their preparedness banquets that we 
foreigners, as they call us, have got to 
be Americans. America means just as 
much to us as to them. They were 



46 WITH OUR FACES IN THE LIGHT 

born here; they had to be Americans. 
We make ourselves Americans because 
we want to be and we are just as good 
Americans as they are — and we'll fight 
for America, too." 

I did not bother to ask him if he 
had hung out a flag. It did not mat- 
ter. I rejoiced in his outburst. He 
had America in his heart. Our cli- 
mate would see to it that his children 
had it in their features; our customs 
that they had it in their habits of 
thought and manner so strongly that 
they would be distinctively American 
anywhere in the world. 



VII 

THOUGH imperceptible in its de- 
grees to those at home, the 
change in America from the 
second to the third winter of the war 
marked a telling contrast to me after 
a summer at the front. I looked my 
country in the face in November of 
1915, thinking what it was in August, 
1914, when I left it ; and again in No- 
vember of 1916, thinking what it was 
in 1915. 

We had pro-Allies more violent than 
the Allies; pro-Germans more rabid 
than the Germans ; but, generically, we 
seemed to see the war as an inexcus- 
able madness and waited with the self- 
47 



48 WITH OUR FACES 

consciousness of reason, which could in 
no sense justify such destruction, for 
the return of sanity. Our national pol- 
icy of assimilation instinctively avoided 
offense of the alien strains in our 
population. Satire at the ghastly 
spectacle was an expedient of neutral- 
ity that flowed from editorial pens, 
while we were safe out of the reach of 
chaos. Europe had turned to murder; 
we would keep out of murder's way. 

Our papers were open to all argu- 
ments, all propaganda. The mass of 
the American people posed judicially 
between the furies. Both sides were 
gouging and lying asserted the cynical, 
who were confused as to what was lies 
and what was truth that passed the 
censorship. As well believe the special 
pleading of one madman as the other. 



IN THE LIGHT 49 

Belgian outrages? Would the mem- 
bers of that kind German family who 
lived next door kill women and chil- 
dren? No! 

The German staff, which reasons 
that everything is justified for the 
end of power, turned its machinery 
toward the molding of American pub- 
lic opinion. America liked interviews: 
everybody from Count Zeppelin to the 
Crown Prince submitted to the Ameri- 
can interviewer. Americans liked sen- 
timent: give them a picture of a Ger- 
man soldier holding a Belgian child on 
his knee. Bluster one day, fawn the 
next; spend money directly and indi- 
rectly. Have every propagandist re- 
peat that the " war was forced upon 
us." France is popular: pity the 
French. Justify German militarism 



50 WITH OUE FACES 

on land by scoring British militarism 
at sea which was starving German 
women and children. Picture the hor- 
ror of this war, its wickedness, the 
while you whisper peace proposals and 
von Falkenhayn strikes at Verdun. 

America was thinking aloud. This 
is an American habit which foreigners 
recognize. What puzzles them is the 
nature of the conclusions that are 
forming in the back of the head while 
we are thinking aloud, which is one of 
the results of assimilation feeling its 
way in keeping the national family to- 
gether. 

We like to hear what the other fel- 
low has to say. Where the European 
will turn away from the orator who 
is expressing convictions different to 
his, the American will listen and even 



IN THE LIGHT 51 

applaud before going to the polling 
booth to vote the other way. This 
characteristic is the evil genius of ma- 
chine politicians. But nine-tenths of 
us were for the allied cause, if not for 
England, France, Italy or Russia in- 
dividually, as a secret ballot would 
have shown. We could not be neutral 
in heart between right and wrong. 

The war brought prosperity and we 
accepted it as a treasure-trove washed 
up on our shores. In the second win- 
ter we were enjoying it; in the third 
winter we were not. We wanted the 
war over, regardless of our pockets. 
The sense of its machinelike, continu- 
ing horror had deepened; a greater 
sympathy was in our hearts. The 
New Year's orgy in New York of 
1915 was not repeated in 1916. Where 



52 WITH OUR FACES 

in 1915 exponents of preparedness had 
talked of guns and ships and of pre- 
paredness itself as if it were something 
purchasable by the yard, in 1916 we 
were talking of the preparedness of 
manhood, of universal service. 

Was this the same America of other 
days, which had had a certain in- 
herent feeling of sufficiency in the con- 
viction that every American was born 
a soldier? Surely war is a rapid 
teacher. Now you could say that the 
whole volunteer system was ridiculous 
and inefficient and un-American, with- 
out being subjected to an amused con- 
descension which formerly had warned 
you of the folly of proven experience 
tilting at an adamant state of mind. 

Pessimists were holding up the mir- 
ror and drawing faces of gloom and 



IN THE LIGHT 53 

derision for it to reflect. We were 
irresolute and flabby. Wasn't I dis- 
gusted with my country? friends asked. 
On the contrary, the returned traveler 
was highly pleased with the restless- 
ness, the heart searching, in the midst 
of peace, comfort and employment for 
everybody. I was prouder than ever 
of being an American. The light was 
dawning. Would a great leadership 
crystallize it into shafts of lightning 
against world wrongs, and bring vic- 
tory over the Prussian system? 

Other countries would have been con- 
tent to let the bank clearings increase ; 
to sit under the plum tree and let the 
ripe fruit fall. With us the old tra- 
ditions were at work. The diagnosis 
of our trouble was the Puritan con- 
science and the Cavalier honor, the 



54 WITH OUR FACES 

Washington and Lincoln tradition, 
protesting in our souls. 

Less often you heard men saying, 
" Let people keep at home if they do 
not want to be drowned by U-boats ! " 
or, " If you get in the way of men in 
a scrap and are hurt it is your own 
fault!" And when they did say it 
they labored the point in a way that 
showed that the thinking out loud was 
a kind of formality. 

In New York they were saying all 
kinds of things about the West: it 
took no interest in the war or in the 
defense of the nation; as for the Pa- 
cific Coast, it was hopeless. The 
" effete East " had become belligerent, 
while the supposedly red-blooded West 
had barred the six-shooter since it had 
cut up the ranges into quarter sec- 



IN THE LIGHT 55 

tions and paid off the mortgage. But 
I happened to know what the West as 
well as the East was thinking. 

" They're quite wrought up in New 
York expecting the Zeppelins," as a 
Missourian said. " You wait till war 
comes and see whether we don't do our 
share of enlisting ! " 

As a peripatetic volunteer coun- 
selor I had considered the state of the 
nation with Pullman car porters, 
drummers, chambers of commerce, lit- 
erary societies, women's suffrage clubs 
and mechanics' institutes. I had gone 
from the Northwest, where they say 
that sleighing is poor three months in 
the year, to the soft breezes of the 
Gulf; gone to sleep in sight of snow 
on the plains and awakened to look 
out at strawberry beds in bearing; 



56 WITH OUR FACES 

watched our cities grow and taken a 
run around the suburbs before dinner, 
where I ascertained whom of those 
present were for universal service 
before answering the question 
when I thought the war would be over. 
Whether or not I was informing I 
cannot say. Certainly I was being 
informed. 

The Eastern seaboard complained 
about provincialism in other sections, 
which, in turn, complained about the 
provincialism of the Eastern sea- 
board. Passing through a range of 
climate under the flag greater than 
that from Copenhagen to Sicily, I had 
in mind, too, the European question 
if climatic and geographical lines must 
not eventually separate us into differ- 
ent nations. The delightful answer 



IN THE LIGHT 57 

was insistence that each locality was 
more American than the others. 

All the way from Dakota to the Rio 
Grande people read the same maga- 
zines and books, play the same kind 
of games, respond to the same senti- 
ments, are interested in the same big 
league scores, look to Washington as 
the political center as much as a 
Frenchman looks to Paris. The dome 
of the Capitol is a symbol as distinct 
to them as the Big Ben Tower to an 
Englishman. 

Dismiss the idea of distance, which 
is misleading, and the difference be- 
tween a New Englander and a Texan 
is not so great as that between a 
Savoyard and a Breton of France. 
Where a Cornish miner, a Yorkshire 
farmer, a Scotch shepherd and a Lon- 



58 WITH OUR FACES 

don cockney would have difficulty in 
understanding one another's tongue, 
bring a lumberjack from the Michi- 
gan woods, a Georgia cracker, and any 
others of the most dissociated Ameri- 
can types together and none will need 
an interpreter. No people have more 
complete unity of language than our 
second generation who have all been 
taught in the public schools. We have 
more people speaking English than all 
the rest of the world together. Our 
common intelligence is the highest in 
the world, electric in its connection 
from end to end of the country. It 
binds us together and makes us act 
together in response to the patriotism 
of idea born of our traditions. Yet 
one heard sinister whispers of German 
reservists secretly drilling; of bombs 



IN THE LIGHT 59 

to blow up bridges and arsenals. What 
would happen in Milwaukee and Ho- 
boken? 

But my sampling of all parts of the 
country did not undermine the confi- 
dence that I had when good-humoredly 
I told the English statesman that if our 
democracy ever decided for war, the 
Germans at home would give us less 
trouble than the Irish in Ireland had 
given him. 



VIII 

"\ 7* ES > * do a deal of thInkin g 

about the war," said an Iowa 
farmer. " Maybe we country 
folks do more thinking than city folks. 
We have plenty of time for it when 
we are plowing, or dragging, or even 
doing the chores." 

His acres were fifteen hundred miles 
from the sea, which he had never seen, 
and more than four thousand miles 
from the French front. After think- 
ing on the slaughter in the trenches 
he was not eager to have his son 
charging through curtains of fire in- 
stead of sowing wheat. This did not 
mean that he was not a good Ameri- 
61 



62 WITH OUR FACES 

can; only that he was a normal, sen- 
sible human being. His thinking as- 
sociated war only with drilling youth 
and sending them into battle. Some 
people who criticized him for irrespon- 
siveness seemed to think that war was 
a kind of game which had become fash- 
ionable the world over. To him war 
meant war. When he considered its 
horrors he applied them, as people did 
in the South, where they still have the 
memory of war's ravages and where 
they know the cost. 

" It's hard to get facts," said the 
farmer. " I guess the President knows 
most about it. We've got to leave it 
to him." 

We Americans are great sticklers 
for facts, probably because we are ac- 
customed to discounting reportorial 



IN THE LIGHT 63 

enterprise in separating the facts from 
the profusion of entertainment and 
thrill which we demand in our news- 
papers. Germany's request for a 
peace conference was a fact; the Al- 
lies' reply stating their terms was 
another; Germany's failure to state 
hers another ; the President's " peace 
without victory " message another : and 
the German note announcing ruthless 
submarine warfare the clinching fact. 
" That settles it ! " you heard men say- 
ing on all sides. We had ceased to 
think aloud. 

" That settles it ! " spoke the opinion 
of the nation from end to end. There 
was no excitement in the South where I 
was at the time; none in the Middle 
West where I was when the President 
gave Bernstorff his passports. Our 



64 WITH OUR FACES 

newspaper headlines looked as if we 
were hectic ; but with us the press blows 
off our emotion by proxy. 

"I am of German descent. I hope 
that the Germans will beat the Eng- 
lish!" said a German to me the day 
before the ruthless note; and the next 
day he said : " We've got to show the 
Kaiser that we are a nation and we 
shall have to do it with war. 55 

Thus, the patriotism of idea had 
worked out its processes ; thus, the 
facts had done their work; thus, the 
toleration of freedom which binds 
races together had wrought the wonder 
which Europe cannot understand — the 
wonder that is the triumph of our 
unique nationalism, a wonder which we 
hardly appreciate ourselves. 

Victory of one kind was ours already, 



IN THE LIGHT 65 

the victory of unity ; a victory reflected 
in the audience in a New England fac- 
tory town where I spoke soon after our 
declaration of war. I was told that 
there were people of at least six differ- 
ent European races present. The 
Mayor's speech introducing me was a 
classic of Americanism. He warned 
his hearers that many of them had 
relatives fighting in the ranks of the 
enemy. Affection for their kindred 
was natural and human. Their part 
was hard. Consideration for their 
feelings was the very essence of good 
Americanism, of the cause that had 
called us to arms. Loyalty to America 
of those present he took for granted; 
or if there were any who were not 
loyal — he left that, too, to the audi- 
ence. 



66 WITH OUR FACES 

The European method would have 
been a threat based on the suspicion 
that if German or Hungarian blood 
flowed in anyone's veins, he must per- 
force be an enemy, which is a sure 
prescription for keeping race hatred 
alive. Still, I knew that the Mayor 
did not lack force; no one could 
frighten him with a threat. There was 
plenty of fight in his square jaw if 
fighting were necessary. 

In the front row of seats were the 
G.A.R. veterans, in the blue of their 
day, and in the second the Boy 
Scouts, in the khaki of ours; boys 
mostly of foreign parentage, linking 
the tradition of old New England with 
the tradition which Ellis Island had 
formed. Though of foreign parent- 
age, the Scouts were American already 



IN THE LIGHT 67 

to the eye, their roots in our sunlight 
and spirit if not yet in the soil. The 
old boys and the young boys laughed 
over the same stories, as they always do. 
If the parents sometimes looked 
backward in lingering, affectionate 
reminiscence to their home lands 
across the sea, when they looked for- 
ward it was to the future of their 
children, American by birth and en- 
vironment, who were to live and bring 
forth their young and die in Amer- 
ica and have the same stake in its 
unity for which the veterans had 
fought. There was something singu- 
larly appealing in that expanse of as- 
sorted faces so distinctly of many 
races behind the faces of the old fight- 
ers and the Scouts which were so dis- 
tinctly American, brought together in 



68 WITH OUR FACES 

our New England — my New England, 
with its contrast of colleges and fac- 
tories. 

The colleges seem almost as numer- 
ous as the factories. Founding col- 
leges was a habit of our forefathers 
carried westward with their migrating 
sons, as if in prevision of the future 
requirements of assimilation. The 
doors of the colleges are open to the 
sons and daughters of these newcomers, 
who may achieve a place in our aris- 
tocracy, which will be more and more 
one of accomplishment and education, 
please the good Lord! We have our 
leisure class, too, which they may 
join if they have a little money. The 
traveler may meet the older men and 
women, parental white heads on an 
Odyssey in a Pullman section, who have 



IN THE LIGHT 69 

gained a competence, going southward 
in winter to kindly airs and returning 
northward in spring, enjoying well- 
earned rest in the evening of their 
days. 

If some of us think well of our 
lineage, why, that is only proper pride 
unless it inclines to snobbishness, which 
requires a reminder that most of the 
forefathers themselves were not lords' 
sons but men who were expected to 
touch their forelock to the squire in 
passing and who crossed the sea to 
clear the forests and make themselves 
squires. Some college clubs may ask 
if the several times great-grandfather 
came over in the Mayflower, but, gen- 
erally speaking, faculty and fellow- 
students in all our schools show their 
favor to the boy who has by his own 



70 WITH OUR FACES 

merit, whoever his father was, estab- 
lished himself in the aristocracy of 
self-respect and application. Ger- 
many has its officer class drawn from 
a class. The son of a bootblack may 
go through West Point if he has the 
physique and the brain. 

Our colleges are the perfected mills 
of final absorption. No one can be a 
Rah ! Rah ! boy for three or four years 
and escape being American. Alfieri, 
Schmidt, Levinsky, MacPherson become 
of the same piece. Touch their quick 
and they may revert to race in the 
pride of parenthood which no man 
should disown. But though our col- 
leges take in other than gentlemen's 
sons, good taste refrains from touch- 
ing their quick, which is a practice much 
in fashion in European schools. 



IN THE LIGHT 71 

" I can remember the time," said an 
old New England business man, " when 
you used to see signs of i Boy wanted. 
No Irish need apply ' in city windows. 
Now these same Irish boys are among 
our leading citizens." 

You don't see such signs to-day. 
We have passed that stage. The only 
question is, Is he an honest, industrious 
boy? If we had not passed that stage 
European skepticism about our unity 
might be well grounded; that Mayor 
might not have been able to leave the 
question of loyalty to the audience; 
that factory manager in another part 
of the country might not have left it to 
his men, who were largely of foreign 
origin and supposedly pro-German. 

He did not employ guards against 
disorder, as some of the directors sug- 



72 WITH OUR FACES 

gested, but hung big American flags in 
every part of his works. One work- 
man and only one made a disparaging 
remark about the flag. Those near by 
left their machines and gathered around 
him and quietly, without laying hands 
on him — though it was evident that 
their hands could close into very 
sturdy fists — told him that he had bet- 
ter not say that again. Public opin- 
ion having performed its function, 
they returned to their places. The su- 
perintendent who had watched the pro- 
ceeding spoke of its dignity; a dignity 
that made sport of any precautions 
against disloyal actions and somewhat 
disappointed the authors of sinister 
whispers about possible uprisings in 
" foreign quarters." 

I like best the story of the chief of 



IN THE LIGHT 73 

police of a great city who had de- 
clined the offer of volunteer police to 
act in such an emergency, because the 
section where you hear a babel of 
strange tongues in that city was so 
quiet after we declared war on Ger- 
many that the chief thought it an in- 
sult to the residents to provide extra 
patrols. He smilingly apologized to 
the eager volunteers for not having 
had a chance to do their bit. No 
bridges blown up, no bomb-throwing, 
no rioting, and the West recruiting 
faster than the East — the pessimists 
confounded! Yes, America had won a 
victory for you and for me, for all 
who have labored in the processes of 
assimilation: a victory of democracy, 
of our institutions, of the light, which 
thrilled the war-wise traveler in his 



74 WITH OUR FACES 

pride of country more than the storm- 
ing of redoubts. 

There was no enthusiasm for the 
war. Why should there be? We went 
to war as a duty to our manhood, to 
the world, without the prejudice of 
race which is the cause of wars; we 
went in an American way for an Ameri- 
can end. Aside from principle, France 
was fighting for her soil; but our soil 
was not in danger. Germany went for 
conquest ; while Mexico, ripe and invit- 
ing by all the rules of the relations of 
the strong to the weak, we had re- 
fused to pacify. Aside from princi- 
ple, England went to war for her sea- 
power, her colonies, her existence; we 
sought no territory, no indemnity. Our 
purpose was to be found in the one- 
hundred-and-forty-one-year-old tradi- 



IN THE LIGHT 75 

tion of the same kind of freedom for 
foreigners across the sea that we gave 
to those whom we absorbed. 

If ever a nation had its face in the 
light it was ours. Was this enough? 
How serious were we? How strong 
was our resolution ? What strain would 
our unity bear? The issue was three 
thousand miles away and the British 
navy and a wall of French and British 
soldiers were between us and our enemy. 
Must we Americans go through the fire 
that had remade England and France, 
the fire of hardship and sacrifice which 
Washington's and Grant's and Lee's 
legions knew, before we could be sure 
that we would bear the supreme test? 



IX 

WE must keep the cause con- 
crete and burning in our 
minds. Its name is Fright- 
fulness and its lair the General Staff 
offices in Berlin. Consider this word 
as the shibboleth of a system; then 
consider nature and the history of war 
itself. 

Even among beasts the male refuses 
to strike the female; yet the German 
staff wages war against women and 
children. Between two men in a pas- 
sion fighting with nature's weapons 
there is a recognized foul blow which 
may not be struck; but the German 
staff is striking foul blows which all 
77 



78 WITH OUR FACES 

the codes of combat established by law 
or by custom have aimed to curb. 
Good leaders are those who have tried 
to stay the rapacity of soldiers in the 
intoxication of victory or the lust for 
revenge ; bad leaders those who gave it 
free rein. The German staff has not 
only given it free rein but urged it on. 

One day in the Boxer campaign I 
saw some American soldiers looting 
just as their general happened along. 

" Don't you know that that house 
is not yours; that that is not your 
property? " he asked as he appeared at 
the door of the house which they were 
ransacking. 

They dropped their plunder as they 
saluted. But the salute was only the 
symbol of obedience. I saw in their 
faces that they knew that they were 



IN THE LIGHT 79 

in the wrong. Their leader had roused 
their consciences. Another general of 
another nation closed his eyes to loot- 
ing. He was worse than his men; re- 
sponsible for encouraging the brute in 
them. 

By slow degrees humanity has devel- 
oped its better instincts, but all that 
has been gained in a thousand years 
may be lost in a day if war's fury is 
unbridled. 

The Hague and the Geneva Conven- 
tions and similar international efforts 
have had as their object mitigation 
of the horrors of war as well as the 
preservation of peace. The Red Cross 
itself is not old and it is only an ex- 
pression of the ethics of not firing 
on a wounded man, of easing his 
misery and saving a maximum from 



80 WITH OUR FACES 

the human wreckage of war. War 
was a fact, a human manifestation; 
but let it bestialize man as little as 
possible. 

What male has not known the time 
when he wanted to settle his differences 
with another male by blows? If he 
were young and the other old the 
ethical spirit of generations of civiliza- 
tion forbade. Had he struck the elder 
man public opinion would have been 
outraged; the court of neutrality pro- 
scribed such an act. A group of 
schoolboys forming a ring to see fair 
play at fisticuffs is only an expression 
in miniature of The Hague Convention ; 
the exclamation, " Let us have it out, 
man to man ! " as two men strip off 
their coats is the expression in nature's 
weapons of the dueling code. There is 



IN THE LIGHT 81 

bad blood between the two which they 
think can be removed only by combat. 
Duelists were given the same kind of 
pistols; the seconds saw to it that the 
same kind of bullets and the same 
amount of powder were used and that 
both men fired at a given word. 

Murderous dueling has passed, and 
in nations where dueling survives it is so 
modified that the bad blood may be 
drawn by a prick. But suppose that 
one duelist had drawn and fired without 
awaiting the command. Well, public 
opinion would have called that murder, 
as the public opinion of nations con- 
demns an attack without a declaration 
of war. 

But savage man did not bother 
about rules. He struck the other man 
from behind and took his property, 



82 WITH OUR FACES 

which bred hate in the dead man's 
sons and thus continued strife and de- 
struction. Frightfulness was the gospel 
of prehistoric wars, which were wars 
of population and therefore prosecuted 
mercilessly. When one savage tribe 
swept down on another and wiped it 
out, the code of frightfulness was 
vindicated according to the logic of 
frightfulness. Public opinion did not 
matter. It had been killed with the 
war ax; or if any remained among 
neighboring tribes it feared to express 
itself because it lacked power. 

Thus, power became its own excuse, 
its own law and judge and the god of a 
modern people, set up by the German 
staff. War was force and force should 
be used in any way possible. World 
public opinion could curb the system of 



IN THE LIGHT 83 

the sword only with the sword. As 
one German officer said: 

" You ask how we shall like to face 
the Lusitania and other facts in his- 
tory, and our answer is that we shall 
write the history of this war as Caesar 
wrote the history of his. 55 

It seems a little hard on Caesar, 
who went against uncivilized tribes not 
against the France of Pasteur. 



THIS new materialism justified 
the foul blow against Belgium 
and the bombing of women and 
children, because war was killing and 
destruction and the answer to all argu- 
ments. It made a hand grenade worth 
more than all the books of law, a 
seventeen-inch howitzer greater than 
a cathedral. Industriously the prin- 
ciple was refined into processes of 
efficiency, supported by college profes- 
sors as a theory of " Kultur " ; an effi- 
ciency setting at naught the normal 
chivalrous instincts of Christian man 
no less than the codes which he had 
laboriously formulated. 
85 



86 WITH OUR FACES 

" You do not understand our sys- 
tem, 55 said a German woman to me. 

" Perhaps I do/' I replied. " In the 
early days of the war if a German 
plane had to descend in the allied lines, 
though the aviator might be alive, the 
German guns began to fire on the 
plane, hoping to get some of the allied 
soldiers who ran up to the spot. It 
did not matter if the guns killed their 
own man, for he was a prisoner, an 
expended unit that could fight no 
more." 

" Precisely ! " she said. " It is the 
sacrifice of the individual to the whole. 
We do it among ourselves. We had 
to do it with some Belgians." 

" But one day it happened that a 
German plane which had engine trou- 
ble could not reach its own lines, and 



IN THE LIGHT 87 

lighted in No Man's Land just short 
of the German trench. The German 
soldiers came out of the trench and 
gathered around the plane. In the 
first months of the war the French 
would have held their fire and looked 
on in the impulse of chivalry at these 
Germans, for the moment not soldiers 
but curious spectators. Such incidents 
soften the brutality of war. But now, 
in the spirit of reprisal which fright- 
fulness has developed, an officer passed 
the word and, waiting on an opportune 
moment, machine guns and rifles mowed 
the Germans down." 

"Why not? He was right," said 
the German woman. " War is war. 
Those Germans were stupid. They 
had a fool for an officer in that 
trench," 



88 WITH OUR FACES 

" That is the sort of fighting that 
breeds hate, which breeds more hate 
and more war," I said. 

" I believe in hate ! " she insisted. 

Yet I was certain that she did not 
at heart. She was kind if left to the 
natural instincts of Christian individ- 
ualism. I did not believe that German 
soldiers would fire on their own aviator 
except by command; for it was an act 
contrary to human nature. The Ger- 
man staff, as efficient in making public 
opinion as curtains of fire, had inocu- 
lated this woman with the virus of ma- 
terialism. The period was that of 
German hate at its most venomous, not 
to say ridiculous, stage, when the staff 
was transmitting rage to the German 
public to cover its failure to win prompt 
victory. 



IN THE LIGHT 89 

The Germans are not the only people 
in civilized times who have been the vic- 
tims of a poisonous infection which 
takes best in war. The French had it in 
the form of glory under Louis Napo- 
leon, when they went. to Mexico. The 
needs of victory is the hypodermic 
needle used by the German staff to in- 
ject its virus. The staff had gained vic- 
tory over Denmark, over Austria, over 
France ; and by this proof of its infalli- 
bility it asked for the acquiescence 
of the German public in all its meth- 
ods. Victory it must have. Victory 
is the source of its existence ; its pana- 
cea for all ills; its justification of all 
frightfulness. The people suffering for 
the sake of victory worshiped at the 
altar of the god that had formerly given 
victories, as other peoples have, not 



90 WITH OUR FACES 

realizing that it had become the god 
of savagery. 

To us the symbol of frightfulness is 
the submarine, and our cause, the hu- 
man and national cause, that of men 
and women in watery graves, mur- 
dered when they were going their law- 
ful ways. The U-boat defies all codes, 
all rules against foul blows ; sets aside 
£ven the instinct of the male beast that 
makes it refuse to strike the female. 
The utility of all international law in 
time of war, which is the result of cen- 
turies of progress in limiting war's 
horrors and ruin, is based on safe- 
guarding the life and property of non- 
combatants, which at sea means their 
passengers and freight. A belligerent 
may establish a blockade against con- 
traband, but the law says that the 



IN THE LIGHT 91 

belligerent must have the command of 
the roadways of transit and protect 
the ships that travel thereon. The 
command of the sea is on the surface 
of the sea, for cargo and passenger 
ships travel on the surface. 

The submarine operates under the 
sea ; it cannot protect a single German 
merchant ship on the surface. It has 
no headquarters. When located it 
cannot deliver fight even against a de- 
stroyer. No ship can report to it for 
examination. It is a highwayman, a 
guerrilla, and worse. The highway- 
man comes out from ambush to hold 
up lawful traffic for loot or to murder 
its guard if necessary; while the sub- 
marine kills the guard and the passen- 
gers, and, unable to use the property, 
destroys it. 



92 WITH OUR FACES 

Carried to a logical conclusion, sub- 
marine warfare would mean that the 
sea would be without any ships except 
submarines. The deep would belong to 
human sharks. On land the same idea 
would mean a return to the anarchy of 
predatory individualism, universal as- 
sassination and destruction; to houses 
burned over the heads of their owners in 
wanton madness — a land where the 
scorpion and the rattlesnake ruled and 
the only crop was nettles. It says : 

" You shall not live and prosper. I 
will kill you and destroy your home. 
I will have no law except the law of 
death, unless it be my law. You can- 
not survive except on my terms, which 
are not only the surrender of national 
honor but of all the steps in human 
progress away from the beast, which 



IN THE LIGHT 93 

man in labor and sacrifice has crystal- 
lized in the relations of nations and 
individuals." 

No German however brave — and the 
tiger is brave — can have any light in 
his face as he sends a torpedo into a 
neutral ship ; only the fire of hell in his 
soul. 

Such in the concrete is the cause for 
which we are fighting ; and our faces are 
in the light of all the traditions of our 
country, from Valley Forge to Ellis 
Island, and of all the ages of human 
progress. 



XI 

WHEN we think of Washing- 
ton we see the Capitol, the 
White House and the Monu- 
ment. In peace time the Capitol has 
first place in our mind. In war time 
we turn to the man in the White 
House; and ever that mighty shaft 
seen from the President's study is a 
symbol of a people's aspirations. 

If our forefathers had had type- 
writers and less inclination to sober 
thought they might have written a 
longer, not to say a poorer, constitu- 
tion. They distrusted us a little and 
made amendments difficult ; but they 
seemed to have a deep trust in the 
95 



96 WITH OUR FACES 

character of the Presidents whom we 
should choose, possibly having in mind 
the character of the leader who was 
first in the hearts of his countrymen. 
They made the President both ruler 
and premier; the head of the nation 
and its executive ; and also commander- 
in-chief of the army and navy. But he 
was a commander without a uniform, 
a fact singularly expressive of their 
jealousy of the doctrine of civil rights 
which had been so hardly won, step by 
step, in the world's history before we 
carried it forward in an unexampled 
gain. 

Where a European premier held of- 
fice by the will of the monarch, or, in 
later times, by grace of fluctuations 
of popular passion and intrigue or 
the throwing of the votes of a legisla- 



IN THE LIGHT 97 

tive faction this way or that, the 
President was secure in his place for 
four years, whatever the crisis, what- 
ever his shortcomings, unless they 
called for impeachment. The burden 
was set on his shoulders by the people ; 
their mandate was definite and per- 
sonal. If he were not equal to his task 
it was the fault of the people; a per- 
sonified reflection on their own bad 
judgment or on the misleading dema- 
gogy which painted his lath to look like 
steel. 

Democracy, they say, is a bad war- 
maker, because war-making requires 
centralization of authority. But in 
making the constitution our forefathers 
evidently had in mind the example of 
Washington fettered by the Congress 
of his time. Consider that in England 



98 WITH OUR FACES 

Asquith, first with his own party 
minority, then with a coalition, and 
after him Lloyd George with a new 
coalition, and in France several pre- 
miers, have had their turn of public 
favor and parliamentary support, with 
ever-changing cabinets; and then read 
the declaration of war in which Con- 
gress of our time conferred almost 
autocratic power on the President. It 
is a legal paraphrase of the words of 
the Iowa farmer: 

" The President knows most about 
it. We've got to leave it to him ! " 

His cabinet were adjutants of his 
own choosing, holding office at his will 
rather than at that of the legislature. 
On his word billions would be spent. 
Under his command millions of sol- 
diers might be sent to battle. Such 



IN THE LIGHT 99 

was democracy triumphant in its trust 
when trust must be placed in one man, 
lest authority should be crippled by 
many counsels. 

His is a responsibility as great as 
any man ever had and of a kind that 
no other man except the President 
can have; greater than Lincoln had 
with a less generous Congress. If ever 
a human being must have his face in 
the light it is the President, and his 
strength should be in the light in our 
faces — his strength and his reward. 

He is the interpreter of the people's 
thought in action ; he must foresee 
what would be the desire of their in- 
telligence and conscience if they had 
his knowledge and had coolly consid- 
ered the facts ; his wisdom can crystal- 
lize their aspiration until it stands as 



100 WITH OUR FACES 

clear against the background of his- 
tory as Lincoln's stands; he can give 
voice to their inarticulateness, bring co- 
hesion out of their confusion, restrain 
their eagerness until they have had 
time for second thought — but always 
he is the servant of their purpose in 
the light of their cause. And war is 
action, centralized and direct. 

Though he has all sources of in- 
formation at his command it is hard 
for him to know the truth. Selfishness 
comes knocking at his door in the guise 
of flattery. Even the people flatter 
him. Washington and Lincoln and 

they fill the blank space with 

his name to make a resplendent trinity. 
But a President who thinks of his place 
in history, who plans immortality, never 
achieves it. Washington was not think- 



IN THE LIGHT 101 

ing of his niche in the Pantheon when 
he went to Cambridge, or Lincoln when 
Sumter was fired on. Each with his 
face in the light took up the day's work 
which destiny had assigned him. 

The President must see with shrewd 
eyes the real and the sham and cut 
through the circle of his near advisers 
to his best adviser — the people who 
gave him his power, who elected him to 
act for them. They must ever pre- 
serve their right of free speech, of 
criticism, of rulership through him as 
a deputy. Otherwise, they will lose 
the very thing which they are fighting 
to preserve. 



XII 

WHEN everybody was asking, 
"How can I help? 55 and 
friends were turning to me 
to answer the question out of my expe- 
rience, I recalled the rallying "Carry 
on ! " in the letters of the men at the 
front to their wives. Carry on, you 
at home, as we are carrying on in the 
trenches ! Keep step ; keep on march- 
ing, with your faces in the light ! 

A program of life, a code of princi- 
ples, in those two words refined in the 
crucible of war's afflictions ! The wife 
carried on by doing her day's work for 
the country as the army commander 
carried on by doing his. Her work 
103 



104 WITH OUR FACES 

supplements his. Home influences can 
create " the spirit that quickeneth," 
which General Haig made his shib- 
boleth in training the New Army for 
battle. 

Woman sets the standards of econ- 
omy. She is fashion and she is soul. 
She is the personification of the cause. 
When the Spartan mother said to her 
son, " Return with your shield or upon 
it ! " this was the best recipe against 
malingering. But she did not do her 
part if her letters set him worrying, or 
if she did not cut down family expenses, 
or if she went among her neighbors com- 
plaining. 

The woman who rushes about in her 
car to meetings may not be of as much 
service as if she merely gave up her car ; 
and the man who gets indigestion at 



IN THE LIGHT 105 

patriotic banquets may be of less 
service than if he took a snack at 
home and neither made nor listened to 
speeches. It is the simple things that 
count. War itself is blows and sup- 
port of those who strike them. War 
is fighting and those who may fight and 
are fitted to fight should think only of 
fighting, but not everybody may fight or 
is fit to fight ; and he serves best some- 
times who is content with giving sup- 
port. 

We have a naval and a military acad- 
emy and staff and war colleges, whose 
business is to train experts in war while 
others become expert in occupations of 
peace. If our war experts have not 
learned their profession it is the fault 
of lax public supervision. Energize 
them ; hold them to their stern test. Do 



106 WITH OUR FACES 

not clutter them with advice or get in 
their way in your desire to do some- 
thing "warlike" in person. 

We have railroad, shipping and mu- 
nition experts. Leave them to their 
tasks and go on with yours until the 
government calls for you. A wise and 
honest government will choose the man 
best suited for each task; otherwise, 
the government must be reformed. Be- 
cause you have no place under the gov- 
ernment may mean that you are doing 
far more than if you had a place, with 
your reward that of carrying on in- 
stead of an official title which may be 
the mask of inefficiency. Everyone has 
his personal bit at his desk, or his 
machine, or in his furrow, and his pub- 
lic bit in sound and fearless supervision 
of official acts. He can keep his head 



IN THE LIGHT 107 

and steady others who are in danger of 
losing theirs. 

"Go on with business" does not mean 
"Business as usual," which is the fatal 
excuse of slacking. Nothing can be as 
usual in war time. Personal sacrifice, 
whatever your position, is war's por- 
tion, your individual contribution to 
victory. A majority makes it a rule 
in a democracy. Inability to learn 
the lessons of war without war's scourge 
is one of the justifications of war. In 
blood it has taught Europe that no 
one is so old or so frail that he may 
not help. Even a smile will help in its 
effect on others. The joke that a sol- 
dier passes before a charge is an affec- 
tation in the face of death which breaks 
the strain. 

One day I saw an old man playing 



108 WITH OUR FACES 

with some children in a French village. 
They were sitting on his knees and on 
the back of his seat, tugging, shouting, 
asking questions. He looked hot and 
tired, but childishly happy. 

" I used to be crabbed," he said. " I 
didn't care much for children, but now 
I have found this way of doing my bit. 
It gives their mothers freedom to work 
and that means heartening and more 
supplies for the men at the front." 

The old man may all unconsciously 
have started an endless chain of kind- 
nesses. The war had taught him not to 
think of himself, but of others; it had 
brought the light to his face. For the 
service of war is in making human be- 
ings objective; it is the hideous anti- 
dote for selfishness. 

"One thing I do know," said one 



IN THE LIGHT 109 

of the richest men in London to me. 
"Money is going to mean less here- 
after. 55 

Money had been power to him, per- 
sonal power. He had accumulated it 
to that end, but now it yielded its 
service at the call of public opinion 
if not at the call of his patriotism. 
Where its display had formerly made 
him courted, it now brought censure. 
If he smoked costly cigars it must be 
in private; to offer them to his guests 
was bad form. His wealth had become 
his weapon against the enemy. It was 
in the crucible. If England lost the 
war he would lose much of his fortune 
and something that he valued even 
more ; something which he had in com- 
mon with every other man. 

When I returned to my own country 



110 WITH OUR FACES 

from the front it suddenly occurred to 
me that I was wearing an old suit of 
clothes. In Europe this did not mat- 
ter. Over there everybody was making 
his clothes last as long as possible; it 
was the fashion. I became self-con- 
scious until I complied with the fashion 
that prevailed at home. A custom set 
by common sentiment saves a govern- 
ment regulation and serves far better 
than one, as it is the expression of the 
individualism of democracy acting in 
concert, thus preserving and glorifying 
individualism and proving that solidar- 
ity may come from the people sponta- 
neously instead of by command, which 
is the method of Kaiserdom. 

Do not be depressed by the day's 
news. Gloom will not make the next 
day's any better or sink a submarine. 



IN THE LIGHT 111 

Stoicism is a good thing if it is not an 
excuse for indifference* Carry on! 
Carry on ! 

With the guns roaring in an attack, 
I have watched the familiar picture of 
peasants working in the fields, seemingly 
unconcerned when of course they were 
most deeply concerned. 

"It does not help our men at the front 
to win positions if we go to the village 
and stand about asking questions," a 
woman explained. "We are fighting 
the weeds while the men fight the Ger- 
mans. The soldiers are eager to know 
if the crops are in on time and how they 
are doing, and we can send good reports 
that will cheer only if we do our best 
with our labor to make up for the loss 
of theirs." 

This spirit, as fine as the Spartan 



112 WITH OUR FACES IN THE LIGHT 

woman's, was the outgrowth of neces- 
sity born of wounds and death for mil- 
lions of men; but we may have it in 
face of waj: without waiting for long 
casualty lists if we keep our faces in the 
light. 



XIII 

THOUGH France had love of the 
soil and unity of race, these did 
not save her from invasion; 
though England had traditions as mis- 
tress of the seas, they did not solve the 
U-boat problem; though Russia had 
immense resources, they did not keep the 
Germans out of Warsaw ; though Brus- 
sels flung more bunting to the breeze 
than I had ever seen, it did not stay 
the flight of the poor little Belgian 
army. 

Patriotism, tradition, wealth and 

flag-waving are not blows. No error is 

so easy as underrating your enemy 

and every nation in Europe commit- 

113 



114 WITH OUR FACES 

ted it. Germany was certain that she 
could take Paris; France and Russia 
were certain that they could stop the 
German army. The anticipation of 
speedy victory and a brief campaign in 
the early days of the war was the prod- 
uct of a patriotic optimism which was 
measured by emotion rather than by 
reason. 

If we dwell too much on our merits 
we shall not overcome our weaknesses. 
The good soldier looks to the vulner- 
able points of his armor; he sees the 
strength of his enemy without illusion. 
He considers his own faults. Other- 
wise, he may not conquer his enemy. 

Germans will tell us that they believe 
in order and we believe in disorder. I 
want none of their kind of order, yet 
disorder cannot defeat order in war 



IN THE LIGHT 115 

or hold its own against it in peace. 
Foreigners see us as an undisciplined 
people with a rich legacy in land and 
mines ; the spoiled children of our isola- 
tion and of beneficent nature. So con- 
fident are we in our wealth that we are 
prodigal, in the conviction that it is 
indestructible. Before the war with all 
our resources we had hard times, while 
Germany with her seventy millions 
crowded in narrow confines was pros- 
perous. Our military budget was only 
little less than hers; our extravagance 
in government self-evident. 

Nothing is so obvious to a foreign 
visitor as that our best young men do 
not go into public life. Politics and 
taxation and all the official business of 
the well-being of the whole nation are 
largely left to the politicians. The 



116 WITH OUR FACES 

American's ambition is a career of his 
own, a private fortune, his chosen circle 
of friends. Wasn't Uncle Sam, as the 
saying ran in the old days, rich enough 
to buy every one of us a farm? War 
has brought home the fact that each of 
us has a vested interest in the conduct 
of his country's affairs which he may 
not shirk. 

Every American returning from 
abroad feels the intoxication of the 
champagne in our air. We have ex- 
tremes of heat and cold in the Northern 
States which may produce extremes in 
us. In a sense we are a one-idea people, 
riding a reform or a hobby hard for a 
while and then forgetting it as we mount 
another, which politicians who profit 
by the failing call our short public 
memory. 



IN THE LIGHT 117 

Foreigners say that we waste motion, 
lack poise, make a cult of being rushed. 
An old Japanese general who was 
visiting here when told that by getting 
off at Forty-second street on the sub- 
way and taking an express train he 
could save a minute and a half, asked 
naively : " And what shall we do with 
the minute and a half? " For him it 
meant shaking hands with still more 
people. We like a lot of movement for 
its own sake ; we thunder a little in the 
index. 

If Western Europe furnishes no such 
example of individual hustle, its ordered 
methods of an older civilization offer 
fewer examples of exhausted people 
leaning against something for support, 
out of natural ennui or sheer weariness. 
We alternate bursts of energy, called 



118 WITH OUR FACES 

forth by the climate, with periods of 
utter relaxation in reaction. We are 
strong in the hundred-yard dash. If it 
were not for the continual renewal of 
our stock with fresh European blood we 
might not survive, say Europeans, who 
think that we lack sustained power to 
carry through. Their idea is perhaps 
the result of envy of our energy when 
we are on high gear. The strain of 
war and the strain that is to come after 
the war will prove whether or not we 
can still carry through. I think that 
we can, as we did in the Civil War and 
the Revolution and our pioneering of 
the West. And our great asset is com- 
mon sense. It is the ballast that keeps 
any furore of public emotion from cap- 
sizing the ship. 

In Germany the State directs the 



IN THE LIGHT 119 

people ; in our country the people direct 
the State. There, a group of chosen 
men in secret council, seeing far ahead, 
work out their plans for millions of 
pawns. However objectionable the 
German system is, it is not weak. The 
official class is not given to corruption 
or idleness ; it has a sense of the respon- 
sibility of ownership. Those officers 
who made the German war machine 
worked ten and twelve hours a day 
preparing for the day when Germany 
should be over all. Their purpose was 
as direct as it was ruthless. 

No matter how misled his subjects 
may be, we have the fact of a mon- 
strously clever ruler with absurd di- 
vine right pretensions, who has edu- 
cated and drilled a people and gal- 
vanized them with a loyalty that means 



120 WITH OUR FACES IN THE LIGHT 

co-ordination in courage, organization, 
production and fortitude as the pawns 
of skilful chess-play. The fanaticism 
of a false faith put the killing edge to 
the Moslem sword that mocked at 
Christians in prayer in irresolution and 
dissension, as it cut its way to the walls 
of Vienna. 

With us, the many-headed council of 
the people takes the place of the Kaiser. 
Our system will prevail in war only if 
our force is greater than the enemy's. 
With us, in every man must be the sense 
of his personal divine right to rule 
combatting the Kaiser's. 



XIV 

THE great vision is ours. Ameri- 
cans of the old stock can set an 
example worthy of their ances- 
try by heartening the newcomers if they 
falter with the resolution of Washing- 
ton heartening his men at Valley Forge. 
Where the three millions of colonists 
made a tradition for the future in the 
Revolution in establishing freedom, to- 
day the newcomers among the hundred 
millions may share in making a tradition 
for maintaining freedom. They, too, 
may pay the great price whose reward 
is the great destiny. Unless it is paid, 
whether in blood or in common service, 
121 



122 WITH OUR FACES 

we shall ever dwell in uncertainty, ever 
question our faith in ourselves. 

On the drill grounds men of all races 
have only the capital of their manhood 
which they offer for America ; the stake 
of the rich man being the same as that 
of the poor man. Class prejudice will 
be worked out of human systems in the 
awkward squad. Discipline will put 
its formative, corrective hand in the 
name of democracy upon the village 
tough and the spoiled child of luxury. 

No longer is the melting pot stirred 
with symbols. It is over the white heat 
of a furnace and the scum goes into 
refuse. The question becomes more 
than whether or not government of the 
people, by the people and for the peo- 
ple shall perish from the earth. It is 
whether or not this people of many 



IN THE LIGHT 123 

races can triumph in the supreme test 
of nationality. 

Any soldier who may go to France is 
the custodian of that great vision on a 
battle line three thousand miles away. 
His the drudgery, his the risk of death, 
his the great sacrifice. He fights for 
America, all America, yours and mine, 
and our faith. 

The Ridge is before us. We must 
take it or yield to the system. Our 
faces must be in the light or we have 
no more right than the system has to 
victory. 



